BloodyDamnit

This time of year can be frustrating for people in the aro/ace community.

I will be here, whenever you need to talk. 

transcription under the cut:

But then when he sees her coming he gets all bashful and runs away 😭

Hear me out. We're having a last-day-of-pride party at Renison's and suddenly, these two lovebirds disappear from the deck. I, being the nosy fuck I am, walk back towards the fence where Alli's got this water feature thing being built, and find them. Now, I just need y'all to know that I've seen Andrew go from angry at the world to filled with light and that's a fucking sight. I haven't know Neil as long but he went from quiet and awkward to loud and confident and seriously? I fuckin can't anymore with these two.

So. Happy anniversary, Minyard-Jostens. You two seriously deserve each other. - D's Husband

Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound 

You know what’s sad, before I even read this article I was ready to refute this because I grew up believing Chuck Berry created Rock and roll. It’s said how so many knew of this great woman yet none spoke on her greatness.

I also discovered Big Mama Thornton, who’s another hugely influential early inventor of rock and roll — I’m pretty sure Hound Dog was originally popularized by her, before Elvis stole it.

Love Sister Rosetta Tharpe! #BlackGirlMagic

A few of her performances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9bX5mzdihs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR2gR6SZC2M

Also I heard she was bisexual…

I just don’t wanna offend anybody or do anything wrong.

OOC:

Alright, darlin. I had to hop on here to tell you I know EXACTLY how you feel. And it is a really... really shitty feeling. 

Number 1 - you. are. black. You’re one of us, love. I am also mixed. I’m black, brown, and white. I’m light skinned but I have 3b-3c curls and I lived most of my life with the brown/white side of my family, thinking I was whitepassing (spoiler alert: I’m not. I’m just delusional lmfao). And because of this, I always struggled with my identity. 

Growing up with my brown/white side, they never knew how to take care of my hair. I’d get it chemically straightened and relaxed, my curls brushed out and generally tended to with absolutely no idea how to handle it (I have a LOT of hair). It wasn’t until college (and youtube) that I began to learn how to take care of it and also come to terms with the fact that even though I always thought I looked white, absolutely NO ONE ELSE DID. But getting rid of the view that Im not dark enough or ‘black enough’ was so fucking toxic and it wormed its way into my brain in a way that I STILL struggle with.  

(^ this kid thought she was white. I know. What the fuck is wrong with you, Tiara. Also, where the fuck are my curls)

In college I avoided joining the BSU because I didn’t think I would be welcome. I didn’t think I fit in. And even though I still very much experience microaggressions and racism, I’m also very aware that being lightskinned, I have privilage over my darker skinned brothers and sisters. So even though by my senior year I was aware of that, and I definitely identified more and more with my black side, i didn’t think anyone else would - completely ignoring the fact that many of my friends were black, part of the BSU, and saw me as one of them. 

When I finally joined, there was no questions like I thought there’d be. Like ‘why’s the mixed girl here’ nothing LIKE THAT. The president of the BSU and one of my friends interviewed me one day for her thesis surrounding black hair. I expressed how growing up I didn’t know how to take care of my hair and that now I was scared of tying my hair in a scarf, or getting braids, or doing twists. I thought that my black peers and friends might see me as culturally appropriating them because I still thought people looked at me and saw anything but black. 

She looked at me like I was fucking crazy. She looked at me dead in the eyes like she knew I needed to hear it and said ‘Tiara. You. Are. Black. And you should do whatever is healthiest for YOUR hair.’ 

I never forgot that. It stuck with me. And it was like all my friends noticed how screwed my own mental image was and took me under their wing. 

4 years later and I still sometimes struggle. Mainly because I am very aware of taking up room in black spaces because of the fact that I do have the privilege of being light. 

But being lightskinned and mixed doesnt make me any less black. Sometimes I think my friends know that I still sometimes feel like I don’t deserve to celebrate my own fucking culture or history. Jeni has definitely slapped sense into me on several occassions when I didn’t know if I should promote myself as a black creator. 

But I am. 

Because I am.

And that brings me to this.

No matter what, you should do whats best for your hair. If that means wearing a scarf or a satin bonnet, then DO IT. (Definitely the bonnet. I cant sleep without it). If that means protecting your hair with protective styles like twists or braids or wigs or scarves, then DO IT. Every single winter and most of the summer, I put my hair into mini twists and it’s greatly affected the health of my hair and you know what? I feel fucking amazing when I do it and not one person has questioned me or tried to stop me or told me that I can’t or that I’m appropriating or offending anyone because I’m not. And it’s MY culture, too. 

And you know what babe? It’s YOUR culture, too. So you do whatever you need to do for your hair. You do what makes you feel happiest and healthiest and most confident. I swear as soon as I started doing what was best for me and learning more about my hair, and really feeling welcome in my own culture, I was far better off and other people saw it too. 

(Quarantine hair shots. Also significantly lighter than I was as a kid)

Please dm me if you ever have any hair questions, want product recommendations, or ANYTHING. I’m here for you. I know how you feel. 

And don’t forget -  you’re welcome here. You’re one of us. No matter how light or dark you are. Your momma’s black? You’re black, too. 

So with that being said

Happy Black History Month, Babe.

So Neil has been dying to let everyone know we have a new family member. We’ve been fostering him for the last few weeks and with Sir and King’s blessing, he’s officially part of the family. 

Introducing, Madame Meowston Scratchypants Minyard-Josten (Mads for short). - A  

OOC: NEW BEHIND THE POD CHAPTER!! READ IT HERE!!!  

The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.

Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.

Tw genocide, tw violence

When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.

They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.

Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.

The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.

The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.

And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.

Sneak Peak into the intro. 

The Queen™ is gorgeous as always! Here’s us before we went out for dinner and drinks tonight 😄😄😄- Matt

PS look at her. Just look at this woman. Im hers. She chose ME.