a soft hum

Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris

If you live in a state that is likely to repeal, are able to conceive, and especially if you are sexually active, you need to have a plan for avoiding pregnancy and a plan for if that plan fails, and the time to make it is now, not this summer when everyone around you is panicking.

Birth control access shouldn't be affected by this decision, but look into longer acting and more effective methods, like IUDs (99.995% effectiveness typical and perfect use) and subdermal implants (99.995% typical and perfect) over things like the pill (99+% perfect, 91% typical) or condoms alone (98% perfect, 82% typical) that are less effective and easier to lose access to, and use both a barrier method like a condom and a hormonal method if you can. Planned Parenthood has a list of methods sorted by effectiveness here. Plan B lasts about a year, and is considered effective for 72 hours after sex but drops exponentially in effectiveness as time passes: if you don't reliably have a spare $50 and access to a pharmacy that stocks Plan B or ellaOne, buy a back up Plan B when you're able to to ensure you can take emergency contraceptives as soon as possible for the best results.

Start tracking your cycle now: medication abortions are the only ones that can be self managed and are only possible up to 11 weeks after the start of your last period. Not after conception, after the first day of your last period. The effectiveness of medication abortion drops after 8 weeks pregnant, and some sources will say it's only effective up to week 10. If your next period is late and there's even a miniscule possibility you could be pregnant, take a pregnancy test immediately (the dollar store ones are the same as the expensive pharmacy tests). Don't wait to see if it shows up a couple weeks late or if next month's comes: by the time you reach your first missed period, you're already considered 4 weeks pregnant, and you need as much time as possible to coordinate an out of state abortion or a self managed abortion. Waiting for two missed periods puts you at 8 weeks pregnant, almost at the point where you need to start altering dosages for medication abortion to be effective. Don't cut it that close: it's better to waste a dollar on a test than have to seek out a second trimester abortion.

Have a plan for how you will get an abortion, both within the first 10 weeks and after. For early abortions, you will be able to self manage. Plan C, Aid Access, medicationabortion.com, Women on Web, and Women Help Women can all help you obtain the medications you need or information about how to use them, either by mailing them directly or by connecting you to resources: bookmark these.

For abortions past 10 or 11 weeks, things are more complicated, but they are not hopeless. You need to have a plan, though. Do you know where the nearest abortion clinic in a pro choice state is? Do you know how much that abortion will cost and how you will get that money, both for the clinic costs and the cost of travel, accommodations, and two to four days of lost wages? Do you know if they do in-clinic abortions (the only option after 10 weeks) or just medication abortions? What's the latest they can go? Look into local abortion funds or access support organizations. More will emerge as need increases, but scoping them out now will save valuable time and give you peace of mind. Some of the resources linked in the last paragraph may be able to help connect you as well.

the red panda means a lot of things in turning red, and i think one interpretation is the family’s relationship with their cultural roots. it’s spelled out in the movie already: when their family moved to a ‘new world’, and the blessing became a curse. as much as the red panda is a metaphor for self-expression in general, a message that’s easier to empathize with too, cultural identity still plays into it. the fact that they had to cut themselves off from it is so telling.

I was at the eye doctor this morning, and to make small talk, he started a conversation about school. We somehow ended up on the subject of math, and I mentioned off hand that a recent math educator I'd had was incredibly biased. He was confused, asked how she was biased, and I explained that she had lied about my friend and I not turning in multiple assignments (we had, she had graded and returned them) and generally treated us different from our white counterparts. To me, it seemed pretty obvious that she was racist (gone through this too many times not to recognize it), but when I'm finished talking, he looks at me and goes "Oh well that's personal. That's not racial bias, she just had it out for you." He laughs, I sit there awkwardly.

What he didn't realize is there's a reason she "just had it out for us", and the reason is rooted in racism. She had it out for us because we are non-white, not coincidentally. Her saying that we hadn't turned in assignments might not have been racist if it had been its own isolated, out of the blue incident, but when paired with her telling students speaking Chinese to "stop cackling", treating the students of color as overly aggressive and tone policing us, ignoring us when we ask questions, etc. etc, it very much is. And that leads to the point where because white people view racism as select incidents of rudeness, it allows them to put forward the idea that white people can experience racism.

With this, there's also a bigger point to be made about how there isn't really a "white community" which is why so many of them view oppression as individual which also leads to the narrative of "white people can experience racism too!" They see a person of color saying something is racist (like a certain phrase, or an act) and think that it can be applied to their own experiences because they do not see the system that said certain phrase or act is a product of. For example, "Asians eat cats and dogs" vs "white people can't season food". The first comes from a long history of trying to demonize Asian people and portray them as inferior, whereas the second is not rooted in a bigger system that works to keep white people under. It exists on its own, and while some may take insult to that, it doesn't actually do any harm because there are no existing narratives that have portrayed white people as inferior.