“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.”

Words never used to describe Black women:

You REALLY want to be called dainty, delicate, and fragile? Genteel? 

Yes, yes I do. Because I AM all of those words. But because of anti-Black racism and sexism, Black women are denied the very basis of femininity. We aren’t allowed to hurt. We’re supposed to be able to ‘do it all by ourselves” and never show weakness and parade around acting like we’re made of teflon coated adamantium.

At the bolded, that’s not my intention. Your last sentences are what I really want in terms of giving Black people humanity. We are always supposed to be “hard,” both Black men and women. We’re supposed to be able to take any and everything and shuck and jive it off like good little Mammies/Uncle Toms.

There is a level of condescension that comes with infantilization. One can treat me as a delicate individual without acting as if I can’t do anything for myself.

My issue is the fact that Black women are denied femininity PERIOD, and thus my post may come off as gender essentialist in some ways.

that lil danyphantom negro and eyanj w their antiblack misogyny, all butthurt and writhing in anger at black women wanted to be considered as delicate as anyone else?

Hey, assholes earlier in this thread?

Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.

If, when my toddler is, you know, toddling around saying “mama? Big ball?”

Please understand when I say “removed the ball from the premises” I mean I popped it in a fit of exhausted confusion. I murdered the beach ball.

I did some studies of some glassware pics after a very long drought of no drawing at all. pls enjoy

If Grace was a linguist rather than a microbiologist, his equivalent of the Water Based Life Form thing would be an unshakeable conviction that there's nothing special about language universals. Sure, every known *human* language contains XYZ feature, but there's no reason an alien language would HAVE to conform to these rules. He dunks on Chomsky at least four different times in his PHD dissertation. He gets laughed out of academia for his weird ass xenolinguistic takes (and insulting a prominent semanticist at a conference) and goes on to teach middle school English.

“The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.” In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.”