Built Different.

I know everyone is excited because of the recent news Marvel has announced at Disney Investor Day. Personally, I haven’t been able to fully indulge in it given the recent circumstances that has been happening in the US. However, there’s a certain news that left a bad taste in my mouth. What am I talking about exactly? I’m talking about America Chavez.

As a biracial Puerto Rican myself, this is unacceptable. I look at this, look at the actress and I feel grossed out. I have to keep reminding myself to not take it upon the actress but I ponder if I should, since when someone auditions for a role, they MUST have SOME knowledge about the role they are auditioning for.

There’s something a lot of you need to realize. Hollywood has a bad track of hiring Latinos, Hispanics or a brown people to play each other. Especially white casting directors, writers, producers, directors because at the end of the day this doesn’t affect them; they just need the space filled, doesn’t matter by who as long as they at least look the role. This is stereotyping Latinos playing other Latinos.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened in Doctor Strange. Many of you may or may not recall how the role of the Ancient One, an Asian man, was given to Tilda Swinton, a white woman.

The reason this doesn’t get called out as often is because it was given to a woman. Erasure of a minority for another minority is STILL ERASURE even if it was done to make it more "approachable" and by that I mean straight up WHITEWASHING.

In the case of America Chavez, this was Marvel infamously placeholding. What does this mean? It's what I call when they couldn't bother find an appropriate person to fill the role so they went with the "next best thing".

No one should be celebrating these people insulting your intelligence and yet people are applauding the decision to cast a light skinned indigenous Mexican girl for the erasure of one of the FEW if not THE most well known established Afro-Latina Caribbean PUERTO RICAN superhero (the other three are the mantle of the White Tiger and the last two were americanized women of puerto rican descent).

I know people are going to mention that she's an alien and that she represents brown people alike and that's all fine and dandy. However, one can not ignore her being black and the acceptance of puerto rican culture as part of her identity. You can NOT call this representation when they are literally misrepresenting the charaters herself.

I’m not about to entertain someone purposely obtuse, so everyone, let’s all point and laugh!

I know everyone is excited because of the recent news Marvel has announced at Disney Investor Day. Personally, I haven’t been able to fully indulge in it given the recent circumstances that has been happening in the US. However, there’s a certain news that left a bad taste in my mouth. What am I talking about exactly? I’m talking about America Chavez.

As a biracial Puerto Rican myself, this is unacceptable. I look at this, look at the actress and I feel grossed out. I have to keep reminding myself to not take it upon the actress but I ponder if I should, since when someone auditions for a role, they MUST have SOME knowledge about the role they are auditioning for.

There’s something a lot of you need to realize. Hollywood has a bad track of hiring Latinos, Hispanics or a brown people to play each other. Especially white casting directors, writers, producers, directors because at the end of the day this doesn’t affect them; they just need the space filled, doesn’t matter by who as long as they at least look the role. This is stereotyping Latinos playing other Latinos.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened in Doctor Strange. Many of you may or may not recall how the role of the Ancient One, an Asian man, was given to Tilda Swinton, a white woman.

The reason this doesn’t get called out as often is because it was given to a woman. Erasure of a minority for another minority is STILL ERASURE even if it was done to make it more "approachable" and by that I mean straight up WHITEWASHING.

In the case of America Chavez, this was Marvel infamously placeholding. What does this mean? It's what I call when they couldn't bother find an appropriate person to fill the role so they went with the "next best thing".

No one should be celebrating these people insulting your intelligence and yet people are applauding the decision to cast a light skinned indigenous Mexican girl for the erasure of one of the FEW if not THE most well known established Afro-Latina Caribbean PUERTO RICAN superhero (the other three are the mantle of the White Tiger and the last two were americanized women of puerto rican descent).

I know people are going to mention that she's an alien and that she represents brown people alike and that's all fine and dandy. However, one can not ignore her being black and the acceptance of puerto rican culture as part of her identity. You can NOT call this representation when they are literally misrepresenting the charaters herself.

The boys:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.