I'll Face My Fear Of The Sunrise

I knew a girl that this happened to. Her and her boyfriend were having sex and he removed the condom when she wasn’t watching. She became pregnant and he admitted that he did it. When she asked him why, he said “Because I wanted you to have my baby”… 3 years later he does absolutely NOTHING for his son. 

The horror continues…

Police spokesman Detective Mark Jamieson says Charleena Chavon Lyles, who was African-American, had called police to report the burglary at around 10am on Sunday.

As two officers responded to the woman’s fourth-floor apartment at the Brettler Family Place Apartments at Magnuson Park in northeast Seattle, police say Lyles confronted the officers while wielding a knife.

The Seattle Times reported that both officers fired their weapons. Lyles, who was three months pregnant with her fifth child, was hit several times and died just inside the apartment. No officers were injured in the shooting, which took place in the presence of some of Lyles’ young children.

Family members say the shooting was unnecessary and that race was a factor.

Y’ALL THAT READY TO POP OFF YOU CAN’T EVEN CHECK TO SEE IF THE RESIDENTS OR CHILDREN ARE AROUND??

26-year-old Jamarion Robinson’s grandmother Beverly Nixon said her grandson was bipolar and schizophrenic. Still got shot 76 (!!!) times. Would a white person get the same treatment?

The witness said he saw more than a dozen patrol cars at the complex where US Marshals killed Robinson on August 5, 2016. Why were there no behavioral specialist? Surely one of them would know how to interact with a bipolar schizophrenic better than the police.

I’m absolutely disgusted.

Here’s Jamarion’s mother’s GoFundMe in case anyone is willing to help.

Dear White People,

I know that you are excited about Black Panther. I know that all the memes that Black Tumblr and Black Twitter are creating are hilarious and wonderful, as is all media we create. After all, it’s already the best Marvel movie ever made, with the most beautiful cast, and the most perfect costumes and special effects.

That being said though… please think long and hard about how you talk about characters in this movie. T’challa is not your bae. Killmonger is not your precious son. Shuri is not your wife. Absolutely none of the characters are your children or your smol anything. Most specifically? The characters AREN’T YOURS.

The language of anti-black racism is often couched in terms of infantilization and ownership. I don’t give a shit if you’re just putting it in tags, be careful how you interact textually and mentally with black characters.

Black Panther is a movie for black people. Sure, a lot of people are going to see it, but this movie is, for many a black nerd, a lifelong dream. It’s ours, and while you get to share it, you don’t get to fucking claim it. 

The MCU fandom already turns black characters into mammys and servants and sidekicks for their white favs, and it’s bullshit. You turn black pain into plot points for your white favs. Basically you have a long history of treating black characters like shit, and I’m here to tell you to cut that shit out.

Your white favs do not belong in Wakanda. They don’t belong there in meta, in head canons, in fic. The only reason Buckwheat Barnes gets to be there is because he’s currently being used as a decorative ice sculpture for state dinners. You have literally the rest of the entire fucking MCU, go play in that sandbox and leave Wakanda alone. 

Love,

Me, and Black Fans Everywhere Who Are Tired of Your Shit

#a lot of the responses seem to be taking this as discouraging white people from seeing or enjoying black panther #but like as a white person reading ops post this says to me go see and enjoy this movie and be respectful of the characters 

#the thing about infantalizing especially cause like yeah that’s a way a lot of people including me interact with characters in general #calling them smol or precious but like from what I have read that has a whole different context when it comes to black characters #because of racism and historical contexts like op said 

#and then also just ya know not using wakanda as a playground for white people seems pretty simple to me #like ah yes let’s put all my white characters into wakanda seems too close to colonization 

#tldr op isn’t saying don’t see the movie they’re saying be responsible with how you engage with fiction

“sharks do not attack humans in the way movies constantly portray them. sharks are curious, inquisitive animals and many bites come from sharks who “test bite” humans in order to see what they are/if they’re a threat, but that one initial bite can be fatal. while sharks are not monsters bent on hunting and targeting humans, human who hand feed them and treat them like any other animal causes more human-shark incidents (sharks can become used to humans feeding them and thus bite at a human to find fish). sharks are not blood thirsty maneaters, but they are an extremely powerful animal that deserves respect and should be admired from a distance.”

So I’m just gonna leave this here, because hell fucking yeah. Black superman and black supergirl are the heroes we deserve.

I like you

The thing that is getting to me the most about news of Carrie Fisher’s autopsy report is not the results themselves, but the way the media is handling it. Like it’s a Gotcha moment—like somehow we were tricked into thinking she was a better person than she actually was.

And that is profoundly bullshit.

Carrie was open about being an addict. Her opening line from her iconic stand up show (and book by the same name) “Wishful Drinking” was quite literally, “Hi, I’m Carrie Fisher, and I’m an alcoholic.”

She talked at length and in often brutal depth about her problems with substance abuse, her compulsive self destructive tendencies, and her dependencies to both illegal and prescription drugs. She wrote about it in her books, she talked about it on talk shows. She made an entire comedic stand up performance out of it, detailing the lengths she went to in order to try and regain some semblance of safety and normalcy in her life. 

She was brutally honest that every single day was a struggle for sanity after years and years of attempting to self medicate a mental illness that for most of her life was mistaken for feckless lack of self control. 

You know how they way “Religion is the opiate of the masses?” Well I took masses of opiates religiously! -Wishful Drinking

She was bright, and beautiful and bold about it. And she didn’t have to be.

Carrie Fisher didn’t have to stand there and take the shitstorm of criticism people launched at her for decades, let alone turn it into humor. She didn’t. She didn’t owe anyone outwith her immediate family an explanation for her erratic behavior over the years, nor the flack she caught for it. (Think of all the male actors in Hollywood who are in and out of rehab centers so quickly they could harness the revolving doors as a wind turbine. Then tell me the media press about her life and now her death are fair.)

But she did it anyway, because she knew it was important. And she took those bright lights of Hollywood shining down on her like a ruthless, malevolent child holding a magnifying glass under the sun—and she turned that merciless heat and pointed it at things that mattered, often at the expense of herself, opening herself up to ridicule and the severe cruelty of others who lambasted her for everything, ranging from her weight, her mental illness or her audacity to simply grow old.

Is it tragic that her addiction likely cost her her life? Yes, of course it is. Does it invalidate any of her achievements? The strength and vibrancy with which she lived her life and touched the lives of millions around her for the better? 

“I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in. Because sometimes I don’t think it’s such a bright idea. Is it worth the trouble it takes trying to live life so that someday you get something worthwhile out of it, instead of it almost always taking worthwhile things out of you?” 

-The Princess Diarist

Carrie Fisher mattered, her voice mattered. The things that she said and did, mattered. They still matter. And they are no less true and poignant in the light of these revelations.

Addiction is a disease. It’s a dysfunction of the brain’s reward system which requires constant management and care and often goes hand in hand with other mental health disorders. It is not simply a question of willpower or the perceived lack thereof. And while sobriety is to be praised and encouraged—of course it is, of course it absolutely unquestionably is—you cannot possibly know what may cause a person to slip or to feel like they can’t cope without that crutch. And shame on anyone who says it was therefore deserved. 

Shame and my heartfelt wishes that you never go through the things that can lead to serious addiction. Or that you are ever abandoned, derided and regarded as less than human because of it and your death turned into a smear campaign against your memory for the sake of a sensationalist headline.

Yes. Carrie Fisher was an addict, she had drug dependency problems related to her mental health. There was a time she kept it hidden, but after she made the decision to come out about it, she stuck by that decision and became a champion, for herself and everyone like her who struggles. Because she never wanted anyone to suffer like she did in order to get help. And she did it with as much grace and humility as she could manage—and a whole lot more indignity, immodesty, crass humor and love as well. Because that’s who she was and she cared. 

And that’s a hell of a lot more than can be said for those crowing over her death like it’s just deserts.

Fuck you.

People do not exist to stand up to your demands of a perfect ideal of humanity. You do not get to place that burden on the shoulders of someone then tear them apart when they fall under that weight—famous or otherwise.

Fuck you and your whole pretense at moral piety and the horse you rode in on.

Carrie Fisher was not your unproblematic fave. She was in fact extremely problematic, and no one knew that better than she did. 

“I heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And while the place that I’ve arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyone’s idea of heaven, I could swear sometimes—if I’m quiet enough—I can hear the angels sing. Either that or I fucked up my medication again.” 

Writing a historical novel means knowing how far they can travel on a horse, This is good info right here.